Rogue talents are divided into the three trees: Assassination, Combat, and Subtlety. While rogues are always high burst DPSers, the talents for them allow them to choose their own path to DPS. Assassination allows combo points to be gained fast and high burst damage, combat focuses on normal damage every second, and subtlety allows sneak attacks for high amounts of damage.

With Mists of Pandaria, rogues can begin choosing their talents beginning at level fifteen. As of Mists of Pandaria talents are no longer tied to specializations. Players may choose a new talent from the same group of three talents at periodic levels (15, 30, 45, etc.).

This is a tree based on large amounts of burst damage, in contrast to the sustained DPS found in the combat tree. It makes your poisons less resistible and enables you to rack up more combo points in combat, allowing you to unleash more finishing moves. It's very effective end game in both instances and PvP due to larger, more frequent crits and more effective poison applications.

(Active) Enrages you, increasing all damage caused by 5%. Requires a bleed effect to be active on the target. Lasts 1 min.

Whereas the other two trees tend to focus on openers and high burst damage, the combat tree focuses on consistent white (auto-attack) damage to provide sustained DPS. Rather than requiring stealth and relying on powerful openers, you can simply run up to most targets and quickly hack away at them. As such, combat tends to be the best tree for fast leveling, since you can move quickly from one enemy to the next with very little downtime instead of trying to sneak up on enemies.

It also features a great number of early skills such as Riposte, Deflection, and Lightning Reflexes that can complement other builds. No rogue should go without 5 points in the first-tier Dual Wield Specialization in order to increase their DPS. In addition, while the two other trees are often limited to use daggers because of their dagger-requiring abilities, combat rogues may also utilize axes, maces and swords in good favor. Finally, because of the abilities Adrenaline Rush, Blade Flurry and Killing Spree, Combat is the best tree for producing AoE-damage and attacking multiple enemies at the same time.

(Active) Step through the shadows from enemy to enemy within 10 yards, attacking an enemy every .5 secs with both weapons until 5 attacks are made. Can hit the same target multiple times. Cannot hit invisible or stealthed targets.

The subtlety tree complements rogues who like to stay in the shadows. The tree is based on moving fast and staying hidden while racking up as many combo points in the opening move as possible, and providing more options for escape when things go wrong. With Initiative and Premeditation you can open combat with 4 or 5 combo points racked up, giving you an excellent edge at the start of a fight. Patch 1.12 greatly improved the appeal of the subtlety tree with the addition of Serrated Blades and Deadliness, and the pre-expansion patch 2.01 introduced Shadowstep as a high level talent.

The subtlety tree is generally regarded as the optimal PvP and battleground spec for rogues, with many talents designed for sneaking up on players and stacking high opening burst damage to dispatch them before they have a chance to react. However, with the addition of Honor Among Thieves in 3.0, Subtlety has also become a desirable spec for DPS in dungeons and end-game raids. Subtlety also compliments burst damage. For example if you are doing all weapon attacks and no special abilities you drop about 2k dps. Sinister Strike is the starting attack that build up to Shiv. Shiv is a new ability that replaces Sinister Strike. However, Shiv requires that you put your weapon that does the most damage in your off-hand. This drops about 1k dps when in Assassination and Combat specs. Subtlety lets you make up this damage and gives you even more than you need. A starting lvl 80 could easily top 3k dps in a dungeon. Most damage that comes from this spec is a Main -Handed Fist Weapon and an Off-Handed Dagger.

Causes your attacks to ignore 90/5.34 per level/8 per level of your target's Armor and increases the damage dealt by your Rupture ability by 10/20/30%. The amount of Armor reduced increases with your level.

(Active) An instant strike that deals 110% weapon damage and causes the target to hemorrhage, increasing any Physical damage dealt to the target by up to 13. Lasts 10 charges or 15 sec. Awards 1 combo point.

You have a 33/66/100% chance that an attack which would otherwise kill you will instead reduce your health to 10% of your maximum health. In addition, all damage taken will be reduced by up to 90% for 3 sec (modified by resilience). This cannot occur more than once per minute.

When anyone in your group critically hits with a damage or healing spell or ability, you have a 33/66/100% chance to gain a combo point on your current target. This effect cannot occur more than once per second.

(Active) Attempts to step through the shadows and reappear behind your enemy and increases movement speed by 70% for 3 sec. The damage of your next ability is increased by 20% and the threat caused is reduced by 50%. Lasts 10 sec.

Often it is asked which Rogue Spec provides the highest sustained DPS? This argument can be boiled down to a rather simple explanation of the functions of Mutilate and Combat rogues. The real goal is to cause as much damage as possible over a long period of time. In order to maximize sustained damage, any rogue should equip the heaviest weapons they can utilize effectively.

This being said, combat would appear to be the best tree, but not necessarily. The beauty of mutilate is that it allows for the rogue to supplement a lack of weight in the weapon by multiplying its damage. Let’s assume I am a rogue with two daggers and a mutilate spec. The daggers each have an average strike power of 200. Let’s also assume that I have spec’d with the build linked here, which is one of the most popular builds in the game [1]. Let’s also assume that I have Glyph of Hunger for Blood giving me a 3% boost. With Dual Wield Specialization, and assuming both daggers with strike for 200 damage, I will do baseline 350 damage. Taking into account my critical hit chance of 33% plus the 33% bonus because of my talents, I can safely assume that 2/3 of all Mutilates will be critical strikes. This bumps the damage up to 700. Now I begin to factor in the talent bonuses for damage at 80. What I get is this:

That is currently the maximum unbuffed potential of Mutilate. This also is entirely independent from the damage caused by poisons and by other moves. This is simply a demonstration of Mutilate’s potential

Key talents

This section outlines talents to really look out for. You won't be able to get them all.